Publish Content & Measure Success

Sprout Social gives businesses scalability and control over content publishing across all of their social channels. Sprout’s built-in publishing tools make it easy and efficient to create a consistent content experience across profiles, while the Sent Messages Report displays post-specific analytics and data to highlight the impact of published content.

Note: You can also press N on your keyboard to open the compose window.

Click on the gray bar at the top of the compose window to select the profile(s) to which you would like to publish.

You can also add up to four photos to a new Tweet, or one photo for Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn posts. Simply drag and drop an image over the new message box or click the camera icon in the lower left corner to select a file from your computer.

After uploading an image, hover over the thumbnail preview to edit the photo with Sprout's Image Editor.

After adding a URL to your post, click on Shorten Links to shorten the link using Bit.ly. The Sent Messages Report will show click counts for that link to help you track performance on Tweets.

Sprout Tip

If you’re an agency or large enterprise, you can connect multiple Bit.ly accounts for each client or internal group to support their unique Bit.ly settings and keep reporting separate in Bit.ly. Managers or Account Owners can connect Bit.ly accounts in Settings » Business Settings.

If you are publishing your post to Facebook or LinkedIn and referencing a URL in your content, we will pull in the metadata and images for the URL, which you can edit or delete for your post.

Use our publishing features to post, schedule and queue your messages.

Schedule your post for the appropriate date and time based on the nature of the post and when your audience should see the content. The scheduler works best for posts that are date and time sensitive—like events, promotions, new product releases, or holidays.

Select a single day, or multiple days for recurring content, on the calendar and enter the time(s) you'd like each post to publish.

Note: When you select additional days on the calendar, the posting time will default to the previously entered time. So if you'd like to publish multiple days at the same time, select the first day, enter the desired time, then select the additional days on the calendar.

Use theQueue to publish content regularly without scheduling every post. The queue is designed to help your business fill engagement gaps throughout the day with great content like product tips, thought leadership, or industy-related articles. The Sprout Queue can be configured in Settings » Sprout Queue.

If you have enabled Sprout’s ViralPost technology, Sprout will post your message when your audience is most engaged, maximizing the impact of your published content. We constantly analyze your Twitter follower activity by looking at when your most influential followers are most engaged, so that we can deliver your posts at optimal times.

Note: Only Account Owners and users with the Manage Queue permission are able to configure the Sprout Queue and ViralPost. Sprout Queue is available at all plan levels. ViralPost™ is available on Premium plans and higher.

Click Queue Next to put the post at the top of the queue, or Queue Last to put it at the bottom.

Draftcontent, then edit and publish later, or save it for peer review or approval.

Sprout Tip

Use a variety of publishing options to create a diverse content experience for your audience.

• Send trending content immediately

• Schedule time specific promotions or marketing campaigns

• Use the Queue or ViralPost to fill engagement gaps with quality content

Sprout’s Shared Content Calendar provides a comprehensive view of the upcoming scheduled messages across your social profiles. Your team can review published content for a specific day, make changes to a post or the existing schedule, and add content where needed.

Your team will have visibility into the content schedule for any profile they have access to, regardless of who originally scheduled it or if it was scheduled in a different group.

The Calendar section has two different views to toggle between in the upper-right corner. The List view and the Week view. Both views can be exported to a PDF by clicking the green Export button in the lower-right corner.

Week View

The Week view provides a high level look at all of the scheduled messages in the selected week.

You can select a different date range by clicking the navigation arrow at the top left corner of the calendar, the bars along the top of the calendar (which represent the number of messages scheduled for that week), or from the date range selector on the right bar.

The calendar can be filtered by profile (including choosing between seeing Scheduled or Queued messages), as well as Tags.

To schedule a message for a particular day and time, click on an empty block on the calendar.

Click the gear icon on any scheduled message to Edit, Send Now or Delete. Queued messages must be managed from the Sprout Queue section.

List View

The list view provides a chronological view of your upcoming scheduled and queued messages. You can toggle visibility for both Scheduled and Queued messages, but only Scheduled messages can be edited in this view. Queued messages must be edited from the Sprout Queue section.

Sprout Queue

View and edit your queued posts by profile under Publishing » Sprout Queue. Drag and drop, or click the up and down arrows on the lower right hand corner of the post to move it within the queue.

Drafts

Click on Publishing » Drafts to review drafts by profile or author. If you discard a team member’s draft, they’ll receive an email giving them a heads up.

Approval Workflow

Sprout Social offers powerful publishing tools that include a robust message approval workflow. Accounts on our Corporate and Enterprise plans have access to advanced permissions, including the ability to set specific publishing permissions to individual users.

2. If you haven't already connected your personal LinkedIn profile, click Connect LinkedIn. You'll be able to view your feed from LinkedIn and see what others in your network are saying.

RSS Reader

3. Connect your Feedly account to display articles from your favorite content sources when you select RSS Reader. Click Expand to read the full article or Share to compose a new message and post the article to your social profiles as part of your comprehensive publishing strategy.

Note: Configure your feeds directly in Feedly to display them in the RSS Reader.

Publishing Settings & Set Up

1. OurBit.ly integration supports custom link shortening settings. Connect your Bit.ly account under Settings » Business Settings. You can use a different Bit.ly account for each of your groups.

Note: Account Owners and Managers can connect Bit.ly accounts.

2. Use the Post via RSS feature to automatically publish new content to your Twitter audience from trusted publishing sources that have an RSS feed. You can include prefix text (ex: Check out this new article!) When the automatic tweet is sent, it will include a link to the article, your prefix text, and the title of the article.

Set up to five RSS feeds per group to automatically publish content to your Twitter profiles every one, four, 12, or 24 hours. Sprout will post any new content from that source for the selected time frame. For example, If you've chosen for us to check the feed every 12 hours for new articles and there have been 4 new articles published on that feed in the last 12 hours, we will only send the most recent article.

Note: This feature is only available for Twitter. You can only set up a website's RSS feed once per group so you cannot set it up to post to 2 separate Twitter profiles in the same group.

Sent Messages Report

Use the Sent Messages reports to analyze published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. The Sent Messages reports are available for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+.